A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon, page 17
He examined his talons with deep concentration. “I do have a rear dewclaw.”
“I’m sorry, what?” While I was aware not only chicken had vestigial claws protruding from the backs of their legs—dogs did as well—I found it unappetizing.
He gestured to the back of his foot. “It’s to help with climbing.”
“Where are you climbing?”
He shrugged.
Okay, moving on. “What about a beak?”
He touched his nose primly. “I would call it noble and full of character, not a beak.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Is it a beak or not? Is it made of—what are beaks made of?”
“Bone,” Daziel said. “Covered by a thin sheath of keratin.” At my blank look, he extended his hand, black talons gleaming. “The protein that covers hair and makes up fingernails.
“Really?” I placed my hand next to his, aware of the scant space between them. “What do you think is the biggest difference between humans and shedim?”
He shot me a look, a grin slowly growing, but didn’t say anything. I frowned. “What?”
“Don’t be mad.”
I got ready to be mad. “Tell me.”
He smiled. “There’s a pureness among humans. A naivete. An earnestness. I like it.”
My mouth fell open, and I pushed his shoulder. It didn’t help that I was, in fact, feeling fairly earnest toward him at the moment. “You’re earnest! You get wide-eyed over donuts and the opera.”
He looked wry. “Yes. But. Maybe it’s how kind you all are? We’re kind,” he said quickly. “But it’s not the same. It’s not as…intentional, perhaps.”
I frowned, not understanding what he meant. I didn’t like being called naive and earnest—the description sounded childlike. And I didn’t want to be seen as a child. I drew one knee up to my chest, trying to sound blasé and intellectually curious, not like I cared. “Do you mean about relationships? Have your previous relationships been so unearnest?”
A grin blossomed slowly on his face. “Why do you want to know?”
Maybe he wasn’t as shy as I was, after all. “I’m just trying to understand.”
No innocence on his face now, much closer to wickedness, though I could hear how carefully he picked his words. “I think shedim are more sexually open than humans. We don’t tie sex to emotions as often as humans do. Maybe that’s part of it.”
“We’re open,” I protested, feeling defensive. I was using the human “we,” given I had minimal experience at being open or closed. Was that why he hadn’t kissed me? He thought I’d get too attached? “At least here, in Ena-Cinnai, we’re not like in Tzorybium.” In the northwestern continent, across the Long Sea, people were more conservative: no sex before marriage, more reserved clothing, restrictive beliefs around gender.
“All right,” he said. “But for shedim, the pleasure in the moment is often enough for an interaction. We don’t dwell on it overmuch.”
I parsed this. “What, so you’re great at one-night stands? So’s half the Lyceum.”
His teeth flashed in the night as his smile grew even more. “And which half are you?”
One-night stands weren’t an experience I had any knowledge of, as Daziel likely knew, given he’d lived with me for five months. “Which half are you?”
His black eyes hooded, and the smile lines on either side of his mouth deepened. “I’m not having any. I’m betrothed.”
“Only technically,” I said, aware I sounded petty.
“Yes.” He reached out, slowly wrapping his finger around a curl that had sprung loose from my braid crown. My heart thudded in my throat. Our eyes locked on each other’s, and a silkiness entered his voice. “Only technically.”
A shiver went through my whole body, a clenching that seemed reserved for Daziel. It was a response to the depth of Daziel’s voice and the cant of his body and the way he looked at me, along with how much I liked his humor and slyness and sweetness. Liquid heat spread through me, and my cheeks burned.
But he didn’t kiss me.
Kiss him yourself, you fool, the wiser part of me said, the part that advised my younger sisters and was good at being practical and brave, especially for other people. But there was another voice, my aunt’s, droll and dry: You have no future. Inevitable heartbreak.
If I was going to make this leap, I needed him to jump with me. I needed to know if he wanted it too, if I had been mistaken or not about the attraction between us. “You know how I know this isn’t a real betrothal?”
“Do tell.” His voice was still soft. Intimate. His gaze never strayed from mine.
“Because you haven’t courted me.” I tried to sound airy and theoretical, still too scared to give too much away. “You haven’t kissed me.”
The words hung in the air. When he didn’t respond, I wanted to snatch them back, pretend I’d never said them. Why had I brought this up? I should have buried these feelings.
No. I needed to know.
His gaze pulled over me. There was something heated in it, something I wouldn’t have thought I’d be able to detect from obsidian eyes, but it turned out this kind of look transcended species. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
Yes, I wanted to say, but it wasn’t right, not yet. I didn’t want to lay bare such a raw, vulnerable desire without knowing how he felt. I didn’t want to be the only one to own up to the yearning coiled inside me. “I’m just saying, if our betrothal was genuine, you would have shown more interest.”
“Ah,” he said, a smile unfurling. “Making you coffee and bringing you croissants and plants isn’t showing interest? Spending all my time with you? With your friends and family?”
My heart started pounding so forcefully I could hear it. Maybe he did like me. Maybe this could work. “You could just be being nice.”
“Trust me.” His hand fell from my hair, and his gaze slid to the moon’s reflection on the water. His jaw tensed. “I’m not being nice.”
“Aren’t you?”
He picked up my hand. He’d done this before, so many times—when he begged me to make him a cup of tea so he didn’t have to get up from the couch, when he was bored and wanted something to fiddle with, when he wanted to convey warmth or support. It’d never felt like he was trying to seduce me. His hand was warm, but when his thumb stroked the center of my palm, I shivered.
“What if I wasn’t nice?” he asked. “How mad would you be?”
The odd note in his voice made me frown. “What do you mean?”
Then the first shriek carried from across the water.
Seventeen
Rain broke over us, drenching me and Daziel so completely and suddenly that I screamed. He threw up a shield, large enough to stop the rain a foot above us and send it arcing away.
A storm had arrived, with such ferocity and suddenness we hadn’t had warning to flee. People ran back across the floating bridge from the platform, hampered by the increasingly rough water, and the bonfires sizzled out. Shouts cut through the rain as people searched for their friends.
I’d never seen river waves like this, so tall and wild. They reminded me of the ocean back home. And not Port Naborre’s protected bay, but farther down the coast where the land jutted into the water and the sea fought back. These waves were ten feet tall and crested with whitecaps. And they were angry.
“Come on,” someone shouted. “We can enter the caves from the staircase!”
Most people ran toward the promise of safety but not all. To my shock, I saw Élodie run past me in the opposite direction, toward the bridge.
“Élodie?” I shouted after her. I hadn’t even known she was here.
The other Testylier House girl turned. “Naomi?” She sounded insultingly shocked by my presence but refocused, gesturing toward the platform. “Birra’s out there.”
I felt a pang of empathy. I didn’t like the rich girls, but if Leah had been on the platform, I’d panic. I peered through the rain. It was too fierce to see well, but I could make out people on the raft—at least half a dozen. As for the causeway…I winced. The waves had broken it into at least three parts and submerged one.
“We have to fix the bridge,” I said.
“Using what spell?” Élodie shot back, desperation turning her voice mean. “Do you know one? Or would you have me write one on the spot?”
Shoot. I turned to Daziel, who’d just warded off the rain in a completely inhuman way. “Can you do something?”
His dark eyes were impenetrable. “What?”
“We can’t let them die. You have different magic than us. Able to affect natural elements, faster, bigger—”
“More volatile,” he said. “And I don’t care about them not dying; I care about you not dying.”
But there was something in his face, in his tone, that made me think he could do something. He did have an idea. “Please, Daziel. They could drown.”
Daziel’s gaze transferred briefly to Élodie before returning to mine. “It’s too dangerous.”
“There’s half a dozen people out there.” I nervously eyed the rising waters. “We could get more people. Make a human chain and go into the water.”
“You’d help them even if it put you at risk?”
“We have to do something.”
Daziel cursed low under his breath. His gaze on mine seemed to weigh me, to go deeper than his usual laissez-faire attitude. “Are you sure?”
His demeanor unsettled me, but I nodded.
He kept studying me for a long moment. Then he spoke, decisively, as though coming to a grave decision. “We need a stylo.”
Some people kept stylos on them in case they had to write impromptu spells, along with flasks of neshem oil, but most of us didn’t. I’d only taken spelled hand warmers and a glow globe today. I looked at Élodie. She shook her head miserably. “Nothing.”
I looked around wildly for someone else to ask, but almost everyone had run for shelter. “We could use your—nails. On a rock?”
Daziel shut his eyes, looking pained, then shook his head. “Come away,” he said, and started down the beach.
I followed him, and Élodie followed me, her brow heavily furrowed. “Where are you going?” she called.
Daziel looked back at her. His voice changed, turning cold and authoritarian, something I hadn’t heard from him before—except almost, when I had tried to take his seal and when I had followed the winds. “This is private. I’m willing to share some things with my betrothed but not other humans.”
Élodie looked torn. The storm had destroyed her pretty hairdo, despite the obviously expensive spells holding it upright. Ignoring Daziel, she addressed me. “Naomi, I don’t know about this. He’s a demon.”
Daziel glared at her. “If I do this, it’s only because Naomi asked. It’s nothing to me if a few humans die.”
This alarmed me, but I decided to shelve it for later. “Look,” I said to Élodie, “if we can save them, we need to make every possible attempt.”
She looked torn. When it came down to it, apparently, Élodie might not like me, but she still worried about my safety. “Let me stay. I won’t tell anyone what you do.”
“No.” Daziel sounded rudely aristocratic and walked away.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her, though Daziel’s manner had also set me on edge. What was he going to do, that he didn’t want any other humans to see?
He paused once we reached the water’s edge, where the waves lapped hungrily against the glossy black beach. The wind tore at us. I started to bend, looking for a large rock on which we could scratch charaktêres.
Daziel stopped me gently. His voice, now that we were alone, was soft, and his gaze apprehensive. “This must be written on your skin.”
“What?” Alarm shot through me. Oh. Wow. My skin? Because that sounded a lot like—if it broke my skin…
He didn’t say anything. Wind curled his hair. The feathered markings on his neck looked more real than usual.
Carving in skin meant blood magic.
Blood magic was dangerous, and illegal.
More shouts sounded across the river. Through the rain, I could make out people clinging to the wildly rocking platform. “We’ll be able to save them?” I confirmed, and he nodded. I steeled myself. “Okay. Do it.”
I expected him to raise a hand, but instead there was a terrible ripping noise, and two dark shapes unfolded behind Daziel. They were so unexpected I didn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t comprehend the dark membrane and the tendons dividing it. When they whipped toward me, I shrieked and jumped.
He grabbed my arm to keep me from bolting, and I stared, wide-eyed, at the appendages sprouting from his back. Breath tore through me in ragged bursts, and panic clawed at the back of my mind—some vestigial reaction telling me I was in danger. “Those are wings,” I said, in case Daziel hadn’t noticed.
“Privacy.” The wings swept forward, forming a tight, secure cocoon with only the two of us inside. The world was immediately tinted red. He tugged me closer by my forearm, then gently pulled down the sleeve of my blazer, then my cardigan. He pushed up my shirt sleeve to bare my shoulder and bicep.
Chills rose on my skin despite the heat streaming off Daziel. This suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. My voice came out high-pitched. “Maybe we could fly to pick everyone up? If…you can fly?”
“Too many people,” he said shortly, and raised his hand. His talons looked so, so sharp, and I closed my eyes, reminding myself to breathe.
A slicing pain cut through my shoulder, and I shrieked. He stopped immediately. “Can you do this?” he asked, his voice terribly adult and serious. “We don’t need to. But it is the only way I can think of to save them.”
I swallowed. Okay, then. What was a little pain in the face of people’s lives? “Yes.”
I forced my eyes open, focusing on his wings tenting us, wrapping us in a dark, private world. He carved something I couldn’t see into my shoulder, the pain real but not impossible, leaving behind a burning sensation. I concentrated on breathing. It was warm in here, insulated against the winds, and I wondered if he could wrap himself up like this and sleep in the wilderness.
It was beautiful, too, in the strangest way, like being inside a temple. Light didn’t so much filter through his wings as emanate from them, a steady glow allowing me to see Daziel’s features, so different from a human’s. So ethereally beautiful.
“Repeat after me,” Daziel said. “ ‘Calm the water and form a bridge from the platform to the shore.’ ”
It wasn’t a spell, not as letterform magic worked. Spells were more specific. A spell would have described what calm meant, would have specified the square footage. This was more the high-level takeaway of what a spell would do.
But if I’d learned anything from Daziel, it was shedim had very different magic than humans. “Calm the water and form a bridge from the platform to the shore.”
Magic ripped through me, a dizzying, sickening amount. It billowed through my body, disorienting me. I clutched Daziel’s arms. I felt like I was teetering on a rope a thousand feet above a gorge, or inhaling a sunset. My body was being blown out in every direction.
And blown from it was stillness.
The first hint was the silence. The howling of the wind calmed, the dash of the waves lessened, and the sounds of human panic vanished. Daziel uncurled his wings. In my peripheral vision, I saw the eerie flatness of the water, the people on the platform. The rain kept falling, slashing through the sky, but there were no waves, no dangerous swells.
“Hold it,” Daziel said. “Breathe through it.”
I didn’t have the capacity to respond. Magic lurched through my body, knocking against the walls of my stomach, the back of my knees, the side of my throat. I felt distended and unreal, like it might bubble out of me, explode my body.
A bridge took shape. I’d said the words, but I hadn’t pictured a specific sort of bridge—what kind could form, with nothing to form from? Yet it was from nothing the bridge appeared—from the air itself. It shimmered in the distance, as though becoming more concentrated. Then a structure coalesced in one great rush, the color like cloudy blocks of ice. It started by the platform, then skimmed over the water toward us, growing as it went, accompanied by handrails made of the same concentrated nothing. When it reached the shore, I could see it more clearly, this grayish glasslike structure, solid and unnerving.
“Cross!” Élodie screamed from down the beach. “Birra, cross!”
It took a moment—I imagine no one trusted the sudden, bizarre stillness around them, let alone this strange bridge. The back of my neck prickled. This was far outside the scope of anything human magic could do, and how could you trust something you didn’t understand? But then one of the figures started running across the transparent platform, and others followed. I watched them dash toward us, breathing as Daziel had instructed, magic thrumming through me.
In. Out. In. Out.
My vision was going. The people on the bridge were getting smaller and smaller. Did my knees work? Daziel had wings.
Had I performed blood magic? Had I bound a demon? Had I broken the law and a two-thousand-year-old treaty?
Runners emerged, staggering up the beach, soaking wet. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch anymore. I had to concentrate on holding the magic, on not letting it rip me apart into a thousand fleshy, bloody bits. Like the scrolls. My head hurt. Was it supposed to hurt?”
“Naomi.” A light female voice spoke my name. Élodie. “Everyone’s safe.”
That was good. Breathing was good.
A hand on my shoulder. A deeper female voice. “Naomi, are you all right?”
I knew that voice. Opened my eyes. Yael, soaked to the bone. Had she been on the raft? She looked like an otter. Where was her other otter to hold her hand?
“Let it go,” Daziel said.
